Kindleportable , wireless electronic reading device produced by the American e-commerce company Amazon.com.

The Kindle was first released by Amazon.com in 2007 as a new way to read books, magazines, newspapers, and other written material. The Kindle uses a display technology called electronic paper, which produces a sharp screen image that resembles text printed on paper. Roughly the size and weight of a trade paperback book, with a 6-inch (15.2-cm) monochromatic screen, the original Kindle could store more than 200 electronic books, or e-books, and could be loaded with new material from Amazon.com through a free wireless connection, though only in the United States. The Kindle was also equipped with a limited World Wide Web browser that let American users access the Internet.

The Kindle was not the first electronic book reader; other companies, including the Japanese Sony Corporation, have produced and marketed their own readers. What made the Kindle different was having the marketing power of Amazon.com to distribute titles. A vast selection of electronic books, as well as many newspapers, magazines, and blogs, are available for the Kindle. The device’s wireless capability enables users to buy and read material anytime. The introduction of the Kindle was met with some skepticism, with doubts raised over who would pay the relatively high cost for the unit—priced at $399 for its initial release—even though titles for the Kindle generally cost less than printed works. Nevertheless, Amazon.com sold out its entire inventory of the devices as soon as the product went on sale, requiring numerous customers to wait for months on back orders. In 2009 Amazon.com released the Kindle 2, a slimmer reader with more storage capacity, a crisper display, better battery life, a small joysticklike controller, and the ability to convert text to speech. The Authors Guild, a trade group that represents about 9,000 authors, almost immediately succeeded in having the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature disabled for many e-books on the grounds that it was cannibalizing sales of audiobooks.

In May 2009 Amazon.com began taking preorders for introduced a larger reader, the Kindle DX, with a 9.7-inch (24.6-cm) screen. The Kindle DX, which had an introductory price of $489, also included more storage (four gigabytes) and native support for Adobe Systems Incorporated’s PDF file format. The latter feature is especially important for replicating newspapers and textbooks, which typically contain graphic elements related to the text. The American publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson Education, and Wiley Higher Education agreed to make their textbooks available through In July 2010 Amazon.com for the Kindle DX. In addition, six institutions of higher learning—Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Princeton University, Reed College, and the University of Virginia—announced plans to test the Kindle DXannounced that it would cut the price of its entry-level Kindle, which offered a smaller, lighter case than its predecessors, with improved battery life and a faster page-refresh rate. Debuting the following month was a WiFi-equipped model listed at $139, while a 3G version, which accessed AT&T’s mobile broadband network, sold for $189.

New trade or mass market e-books are were typically priced at $9.99, and more than 230,000 titles are available. Many newspapers are also available for downloading, which can be automated, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Irish Times; magazines include Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes.but a number of titles—including many literary classics—were available as free downloads. In July 2010 Amazon.com announced that Kindle e-books were outselling traditional hardcover books.